Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THEATRICAL FARMERS AND SAILORS. The actor in the character of farmer or sailor is one of the most amusing persons on top of earth. The fad doesn't last long, but while it does it consumes all his strength and taxes all his vitality. The veriest cockney in the whole profes:ion used to be George Clarke—you could not get him off Broadway. All the grass he wanted to see grew in Union Square. And when his managers wished to send him out, he sat down and wept as he packed his portmonkey for Philadelphia and Bridgeport, bemoaning the fate that exiled him from his beloved city haunts and conveyed him to fresh fields and pastures full of cows and vocal with frogs. Look at him now ! He comes in from a potato patch he hoes by the day, with hayseed in his hair—smelling of his cow—a horny-handed farmer. He will talk you blind on the exciting subject of rutabaga turnips, and his eyes dance with enthusiasm while discussing the three quarts of oats he's raising in pots on the back stoop. Observe the bagginess of his trousers at the knees—that's acquired through weeding onions; take in the slack he carries in the rear—that's brought on by sitting on a milking-stool. I met him the other day with a long thing done up in brown paper, and thought by the cut of it it was a Persian yatagan, and that he was going to play some Eastern part. So I expressed myself, and was laughed to scorn. Catch him carrying any stupid " prop." through the street. No, indeed ; he was lugging a new scythe- blade, having mowed the old one all to flinders on a batch of stones where his hay is growing. Mrs. Clarke cut one crop with a pair of scissors, and George got in another crop with the family razor ; but he found, after all, the proper thing for hay was a scythe, and so he'd bought a new one, and was hurrying hom...